{"id":3686,"date":"2011-02-01T06:42:57","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T11:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=3686"},"modified":"2011-02-01T14:48:29","modified_gmt":"2011-02-01T19:48:29","slug":"morning-read-cuomos-plan-to-take-on-the-albany-sham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/02\/01\/morning-read-cuomos-plan-to-take-on-the-albany-sham\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning Read: Cuomo’s plan to take on the ‘Albany sham’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Normally I don’t link in the morning to op-eds, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo has published an essay in newspapers around the country that gives some insight into his plan to battle the $10-plus billion budget deficit.<\/p>\n

He’ll lay out his exact plans this afternoon.<\/p>\n

For the first time, Cuomo is suggesting that a big part of his “cuts” will simply be a sharp curtailing of projected growth within the state bureaucracy and pass-through grants.<\/p>\n

He argues that his staff has found a patchwork of buried formulas<\/a> that automatically grow the government.<\/p>\n

Unbelievably, this year these rates and formulas in total call for a 13 percent increase in Medicaid and a 13 percent increase in education funding next year.<\/p>\n

A 13 percent increase, in this economic climate, is wholly unrealistic.<\/p>\n

Wouldn’t you like your salary or savings account to be based on a formula that gave you a 13 percent increase even though inflation was under 2 percent? The world doesn’t work that way \u2014 except in Albany.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The governor then goes on to argue that simply by reining in these automatically-triggered growth mechanisms, most of the deficit evaporates.<\/p>\n

[I]f one assumed these programs would increase at the rate of inflation (instead of 13 percent) the $10 billion deficit is really a $1 billion deficit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Albany Times-Union<\/a> is calling Cuomo’s essay “part-spin, part-common sense and part-laying down the policy gauntlet.”<\/p>\n

So what do you think?\u00a0 As we await this afternoon’s budget address (which will air live here on NCPR and NCPR.org starting with some pre-speech chat at 12:45 pm) consider this your Albany open thread…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Normally I don’t link in the morning to op-eds, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo has published […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,4862,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3687,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686\/revisions\/3687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}